Tag Archives: jailed

CAIRO Two police officers were sentenced on Saturday to 5 years in jail by an Egyptian court for torturing a lawyer to death in a police station in February, a rare penalty against members of the security forces.

Lawyer Karim Hamdy, 27, was arrested in February on charges of taking component in anti-government protests organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement that the military removed from power in mid-2013.

He died two days right after his arrest soon after sustaining fractures to the ribs, bruises and bleeding in the chest and head, the initial forensic report showed.

The lieutenant colonel and major with the national safety agency were found guilty of torturing Hamdy to death.

More than 200 lawyers are behind bars in Egypt for defending the government’s Islamist opponents, according to attorneys and human rights groups.

Egyptian police, notorious for human rights abuses in the course of the rule of autocrat Hosni Mubarak, melted away throughout an uprising which toppled him in 2011. They have considering that produced a robust comeback, with rights groups saying police brutality is widespread in Egypt.

The sentence, which can be appealed, comes a day right after nine other policemen have been referred to a criminal court and charged with beating to death a father of four.

He was one particular of at least 3 males who died in police custody in the space of a week in November, prompting riots in his property town and uncommon media scrutiny of police approaches.

Despite the expanding outcry over such allegations of abuse of suspects, critics blame a culture of impunity for police still only hardly ever getting held to account and have named for an independent body to investigate abuse instances.

The Interior Ministry has mentioned it would investigate all abuse allegations.

An finish to police brutality was one of the essential demands of the 2011 uprising that ended Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule. Unlike in the previous, the families of those who have died in custody have been vocal in their demands for transparent investigations.

“The verdict is a condemnation of the torture policy in police station and confirms that the victim was tortured and killed by the two officers,” lawyer Mohamed Othman, representing Hamdy’s family, told Reuters.

“The verdict is a message to all those in power who make light of people’s dignity.”

BEIJING A 44-year-old former organization ally of disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai was in very good wellness in jail shortly just before he died of a heart attack, a Chinese on the internet news outlet reported, adding to the mystery more than his death.

Xu Ming, founder of plastics-to-house conglomerate Dalian Shide Group, died on Friday in prison in the central province of Hubei, according to Prism, an on-line news portal run by Tencent, China’s biggest social network.

Just two months before, for the duration of September’s Mid-Autumn Festival, he told household and close friends that he was in excellent well being and fine mental state and exercised from time to time, a buddy told Prism in a report carried on Wednesday.

The government has provided no explanation for Xu’s death. Prism’s report was picked up by other Chinese news portals and has not been removed from the Net, as can occur with sensitive stories.

Requests for comment from the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Public Security went unanswered. Reuters has also not been able to attain family members for comment.

Xu’s family members was told that Xu had a heart attack when using the toilet, fell to the ground and died, the buddy told Prism.

It took several hours for the household to be notified, the friend added, according to the report.

The trial of Xu, listed by Forbes as China’s eighth-richest particular person in 2005, had been shrouded in secrecy. It was never ever created public when he was arrested, indicted and convicted. His prison term was unknown.

Xu was scheduled to be released from prison in September 2016, according to Hong Kong-primarily based Phoenix tv.

Xu’s relationship with Bo became a focus a couple of years ago when the politician was probed for corruption.

Bo was ousted as Communist Celebration boss of the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing and from the party’s choice-producing Politburo in 2012. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2013 for corruption and abuse of power.

Throughout Bo’s trial in 2013, the court stated Bo was charged with getting about 21.eight million yuan ($ three.39 million) in bribes from Xu.

MOMBASA A British man accused of assisting plan attacks in Kenya was sentenced to nine years in jail on Wednesday after being found guilty of trying to obtain a fake passport.

Jermaine Grant, from east London, nevertheless faces terrorism-associated charges in a trial in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa. Prosecutors say Grant has ties to Somali Islamist rebels al Shabaab, but he denies the charges.

Grant was arrested in 2011 at an apartment in Mombasa and was found with bomb-making material and directions on bomb-generating, prosecutors said. He and many co-conspirators have been preparing attacks in Mombasa and on Western interests in the area, they added.

Prosecutors say that, at the time, Grant was sharing the apartment with Samantha Lewthwaite, the so-known as “White Widow” who was married to one particular of the bombers who carried out the 2005 attacks on public transport in London.

The Mombasa court discovered Grant guilty of nine counts connected to the fake Kenyan passport, including giving a false statement and producing false documents, and sentenced him to a year in prison for every count.

Grant’s lawyer, Chacha Mwita, mentioned he planned to appeal, adding: “The ruling is unfair in a lot of aspects.”

Grant is on trial with two co-defendants, his Kenyan female companion, Islam Warda, and Frank Nyengo, both of who deny the very same charges and are out on bail. Yet another suspect, Fouad Abubakar, escaped after he had been released on bail.

JERUSALEM A far-proper Jewish activist who set fire to a Jewish-Arab school in Jerusalem was sentenced on Tuesday to three years’ imprisonment for the attack that targeted a rare symbol of co-existence in the holy city.

The defendant, Yitzhak Gabbai, 24, is a member of Lehava, an anti-Arab group. A Jerusalem court found that he and two accomplices set fire to a classroom in the “Hand in Hand” school a year ago.

No one was hurt in the night-time arson attack, for the duration of which “Death to Arabs” was daubed on a schoolyard wall. A single of Gabbai’s accomplices received a two-and-a-half-year jail term in July and the other a two-year sentence.

A lot more than 600 young children attend Hand in Hand, which has an equal number of Jewish and Arab pupils. There are four other such schools in the Hand in Hand network in Israel.

Israeli leaders have pledged to crack down on anti-Arab hate crimes in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

Israeli media on Sunday reported a breakthrough in “a recent major case of Jewish terrorism,” but the details are under a gag order.

A police spokesman would not say whether the breakthrough was related to a July 31 torching of a Palestinian residence by suspected Jewish attackers in the West Bank in which three members of a household — an 18-month-old boy and his parents — had been killed.

The incident elicited broad condemnation from Israelis and enraged Palestinians. Bloodshed has considering that surged with practically day-to-day stabbings, vehicle rammings and shootings by Palestinians, which have killed 19 Israelis and a single U.S. citizen because Oct. 1.

Israeli forces have killed 97 Palestinians, of whom 58 had been identified by Israel as assailants or caught on camera carrying out assaults, while most other people were killed in clashes with police or the military.

LONDON, Nov 30 Tom Hayes, the very first trader convicted by a jury of manipulating Libor benchmark interest prices, on Tuesday begins a two-day, appeal against his conviction and a 14-year jail sentence, a single of the toughest to date for white collar crime.

The London case is being heard by Lord Chief Justice John Thomas — the head of the judiciary in England and Wales — Brian Leveson, a senior judge who chaired a public inquiry into the ethics of the British media in 2012, and Elizabeth Gloster.

Hayes, a 36-year-old former UBS and Citigroup trader, was in August identified unanimously guilty of eight charges of conspiracy to defraud for rigging Libor, the London interbank provided price, that underpins about $ 450 trillion of monetary contracts and consumer loans worldwide.

Cast as the ringleader in a single of the rate-rigging scams that has cost banks billions in regulatory fines, Hayes was found guilty of conspiring to rig Libor for profit.

But his legal group is arguing that Higher Court Judge Jeremy Cooke produced legal errors in the way he handled the trial and that the sentence is wrong in principle and excessive.

Much of the initial argument is anticipated to focus on what evidence was deemed relevant or admissible during the trial, lawyers say. The arguments about sentence length are probably to rest in component on regardless of whether Cooke was correct to jail Hayes for consecutive, rather than concurrent, fraud offences.

Richard Cornthwaite, Hayes’s lawyer at law firm Cartwright King, stated he anticipated a ruling this week but added that this was “a matter for the court” .

CONSECUTIVE SENTENCES

Hayes, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, denied dishonesty throughout his trial, arguing he had been open about practices that had been endorsed by senior employees and common in the business at the time.

Hayes’s defence was hampered by his earlier admissions of dishonesty in interviews with investigators in 2013. Hayes told the jury he initially cooperated with the Severe Fraud Office only to avoid extradition to the United States, exactly where he faced equivalent charges. But he later decided to fight the charges.

In his sentencing remarks on Aug. three, Cooke mentioned there was no separate standard of dishonesty for any group of society, that Hayes had “appreciated at the time” he had acted dishonestly and that it was irrelevant that others had carried out the identical or that managers condoned, embraced or even encouraged it.

He said there was “no doubt” the sums involved ran into millions of dollars and that the conduct in the case “should be marked out as dishonest and wrong and a message sent to the world of banking accordingly”.

Hayes was sentenced consecutively for the conspiracies he was found guilty of although at UBS and these whilst at Citigroup in between 2006 and 2010. Had the marketplace rigging been noticed as a single offence, Hayes would have faced a maximum 10-year sentence.

The sentence shows how the UK judiciary is toughening its stance on white collar crime, lawyers say.

Need to the Court of Appeal side with Hayes, it could order a retrial. But both Hayes’s group and the Significant Fraud Workplace, which is now pursuing confiscation proceedings against Hayes to claw back house deemed to be proceeds of crime, could however take the case to the Supreme Court if they fail at this stage. (Reporting by Kirstin Ridley Editing by Keith Weir)

HONG KONG A prominent Chinese rights activist, Guo Feixiong, was sentenced to six years imprisonment on Friday by a court in southern China, amid a continuing crackdown on human rights advocates across the country, his lawyer said on Friday.

Two other activists, Liu Yuandong and Sun Desheng, had been sentenced to 3 years and two-and-a-half years respectively, according to Guo’s lawyer, Zhang Lei.

Guo and Sun had been accused of “gathering crowds to disturb social order” throughout a practically week-lengthy peaceful demonstration outside the gates of a newspaper, the Southern Weekly, in January 2013. The protest known as on authorities to respect media freedoms amid a censorship row.

“He wasn’t guilty of anything at all. This sentence is unacceptable and unfair,” Zhang told Reuters by phone after attending the court on Friday. Guo had previously been jailed for nearly five years for his grassroots activism.

Guo, 48, whose real name is Yang Maodong, had been detained by Chinese authorities for over two years before sentencing, with his trial stuck in limbo due to delays and a boycott by his lawyers last year to protest what they known as procedural violations.

As with preceding hearings for Guo, and other rights activists in Guanghzou, the region around the court was blocked off and heavily policed.

Guo had been held in a crowded cell, and barred from working out outdoors in violation of international requirements on the therapy of prisoners, according to rights groups. His lawyer mentioned Guo’s wellness had deteriorated and that two police officers had handled Guo roughly in court, injuring his arms.

Amnesty International stated Sun Desheng had been forced to wear handcuffs and leg cuffs for extended periods in detention.

Court officials did not respond to telephone calls looking for comment. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has previously named on other nations to “respect China’s judicial sovereignty” in similar situations.

Human rights groups and Western nations have expressed repeated concern about a widening campaign by President Xi Jinping to quash dissent amongst academics, journalists and social activists.

A Chinese court on Thursday upheld a conviction against a prominent journalist, Gao Yu, 71, who was accused of leaking an internal Communist Celebration document to a foreign web site but reduced her seven-year jail term by two years.

Gao has been released on healthcare parole, her lawyer, Shang Baojun, told Reuters. Shang mentioned he did not know where Gao had been released to, though he mentioned that he hoped she could serve the rest of her sentence at house.